Mischief? Amusement? Opportunistic thinking? Or something far more sinister?
Or is he maybe just the highest profile figure that’s taken Trump’s message it’s OK to be divisive and racist and aggreived and foment violence to heart?
When I was a Director at Yahoo! during the internet boom in the late 90s, I sat next to Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang for about a year, and aside from an incident or two which are not relevant to this story, he seemed like a pretty decent guy.
However, that’s never been the case in the internet industry as a whole. There have always been insane people all over the place. That kind of goes along with risk-taking. And probably overall it’s been a good thing. Maybe if Yahoo! had turned out to be a little less risk-averse, it would be even more of a giant now in many different areas than it was back then, and not, sadly, exist now in name only. But, having a lot of crazies around with millions to burn also means there’s a whole mess of people who — as the mildest possible example I could think of — will be literally mailing out pieces of their shit to shady labs to find out how to live to 150.
Part of it is they just have so much money, after they get through all the obvious (cars and homes and jets and stuff), they really dont know what to do with it. So they seek out things — usually expensive things — that amuse them.
It’s also easy to write some of them off as just being lucky, and maybe wondering why they had fallen into some luck is what sent them down some unusual paths of discovery. But usually that’s not it at all. Because they are genuinely some of the smartest people I ever met and/or worked with.
I’m not laying this all out as a preface to trying to “explain” Elon Musk. Or apologize for him. And he is in a league of his own. But I know the type. (And you would too if you went back and looked at the HBO comedy series “Silicon Valley”, the biggest joke in it for me was how truly, surprisingly accurate it was.)
But Musk may be doing what he’s doing in large part just because it’s amusing to him. And he can afford it. And he’s not really risking anything, because he has so much. The people who keep talking about how much his personal wealth…
